Monday, February 23, 2015

Painting as Paradox

“How do you want to live your life, and what does that look
like?”

Clayton Colvin

Reading is a favored pass time for the Birmingham, Alabama
based American abstract artist Clayton
Colvin. As he told The
Curating Contemporary Blog last year “I just closed a show at the
University of Montevallo where I included a lot of the books I had read over
the last year to make that [their influence] clear. Art students feel pressure
to read theory and art history, and that’s great, but it is a big world. I like
fiction. I like writers who open up my thinking more. I read a lot during the
summer especially. It is hot here. Being still is advisable.” The writing of
Kelly Link is a significant influence, about which Colvin says “Her writing has
a way of expanding and contracting that I really respond to, and I saw that
plasticity as analogous to the way I think about painting.”

A second interest is sport, with his child’s soccer exploits being
of particular concern. It’s an activity which also infiltrates Colvin’s work. “Patterns
are really interesting to me. A lot of my visual language comes from my
experience with field vision and the game of soccer or football. Players are
naturally good or trained to read things in their periphery and anticipate events
in space. So, creating space through unlocking patterns and exploiting breaks
or lapses is a way I like to think of the technical act of painting,” he
explained.

But drawing is the pivotal aspect of Colvin’s multimedia
creations. The gallery director of the Eichold
Gallery, Wanda Sullivan, said of his work “The paintings actually remind me of
giant sketchbook pages. There is‘immediacy’ about them that I particularly admire.”

A sentiment shared with Artforum’s Rowan RicardoPhillips,
who wrote “At times, painting seems to give way to drawing, and at other times,drawing
seems to give way to painting. Erasures and additions reveal and conceal other
layers, complicating ideas ofbefore and after, original and addition, right side up and
upside down. The paintings thrive in paradox: They can seem crowded and full of movement, a sense of unsettled energy
populating their spaces; after sustained viewing, however, acalm
and measured contemplativeness saturates the canvases. The paintings seem to
move when you don’t look atthem and stand still when you do - each striving to represent
both the noise in which contemporary life finds itselfensnared,
and the quiet meditation that can free it.”

Colvin’s current exhibition New Way to Forget is on show at Birmingham’s Beta Pictoris Gallery
until the 27 of March.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.